Plastering at the Cabin, Part 2

Contrary to popular belief, it takes a long time for natural adobe homes to return to the earth from which they were made.  The roof (with 2' overhang) has protected these unplastered walls for over 30 years with no discernable 'melting.'  As time goes by and the interior is basically done, I realize I have to finish the exterior.  So the plastering has begun.

The process is pretty straightforward.  Obtain screened soil with the appropriate clay/sand ratio, add a binder  (I'm using horse manure - I have a ready source), add water and mix.  It's a good idea to wait a few hours to let the mud fully hydrate.  Remove dust from the wall, hose it down to help adherance, and then apply mud.  Adobe mud is great stuff . You can keep working it forever on the wall.  You can keep your mud till the next day.  If you have too much mud you can let it dry and put it back in the garden, or the yard, or maybe make some adobes with it.   

As for the technique, everyone develops their own.  I do not plaster with a trowel because I have a difficult time maneuvering the tool with mud on it.  I use my hands to apply the mud, and because I don't have calluses, I use thin leather gloves to maintain my feel for the wall and keep my skin from being ground off by abrasion.  Plastering is fun and the end result looks great (as you can see in the photo below).

Plastered on the left, unplastered on the right.

According to my father, a traditional mud plaster without stabilizer will last 40-50 years.  After that, the walls have to be replastered.  He seemed to think this was a negative, but compared to normal house maintenance, it's not bad. And I think mud just looks great, as you can see here, the result is warm and natural.

Stay tuned for more plastering in the spring..

Plastering At the Cabin, Part 1

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've been plastering at the cabin.  The building is made of basic adobe (dirt + water + sun); no additives.  These days, many people use stabilized adobes to increase waterprooficity, but when my dad was building the cabin, he went with the traditional recipe.  (Stabilizing adobe most commonly requires the addition of petroleum additives.  Another option is the addition of lime.)   The benefit to natural adobe is that anyone who has ever made a mudpie has the basic experience and feel of the material.

The back of the cabin - all adobes visible.

Looking at the still unplastered walls of the cabin is like a reverse stratigraphic investigation.  My father made many of the adobes himself, trucking in soils from various areas nearby.  As the bricks were made, he build the walls, so a close look reveals a variety of textures and colors.  Some bricks were made by now defunct adobe yards throughout NM.  When I was very little, he brought in some burnt adobes (fired in kilns until the clay has turned to ceramic) from the Tucson area, a type of brick not seen in NM.  Some bricks have larger pebbles, others have a lot of sticks and bits of wood in them (which makes me wonder because my dad hates that).  The mud used as mortar came from yet another soil source, so the walls are interesting to say the least. 

They walls are, of course, quite thick - at least 12", more in some places.  In the early days, my dad was sloppy about the mortaring, so there are many large crevices that serve as homes to a diversity of insects and small mammals (how I feel about this depends on how often the fauna pass through the veil into the interior of the home). The whole building is very NM, not at all like the nueva Santa Fe Style featuring smoothed edges, massive walls and weird pink and turquoise accents.